Bill Dickens to Bryan Caplan: I take it that you think that nearly all of the value of schooling is signaling? I used to take that view too, but the accumulation of evidence that I’ve seen leads me to believe that isn’t the case. …
Think about what happens in so many towns after a student leaves high school. Not only does the local social life often stop for that student, it may even slow down for the students' parents as they do not have the same bonds to the community when their child leaves to find work wherever that may be. In other words, there is little or no knowledge integration at the local level of so many places where people actually live, beyond the educational system itself. That lack of knowledge integration in a direct and local sense is a big part of the problem. We are brought up to believe that we have a place to succeed but most likely it is not where we already are, and then everyone takes part in the race to find the magic place where one's life learning can actually be used. We need knowledge integration at local levels so that knowledge can once again be valued for what it actually provides.
So child-rearing should be about breaking a child’s will?
You really think that the only way people can cooperate is if their wills are broken?
It is anti-rational to resolve disagreements in a non-truth seeking way.
I disagree. Some disagreements are unresolvable in a truth-seeking way, eg ones about values, and yet we must make some decisions, so in those cases it is rational to use non-truth seeking ways. For example, where to go for a summer holiday, there's no single truth about what the right holiday is. Or, the religious settlement reached in Europe and the USA about what religion is true, is that of religious freedom - we agree that it's best if everyone makes up their own mind on what religion is true, perhaps none, rather than trying to seek out which religion is true.
This means that if you have a disagreement with a child it is wrong to force them to do things your way.
Ah, so if your child is jealous of their new baby brother and wants to drown the brat, you should not force them to refrain from their murderous impulses?
You should take the fallibilist attitude that I could be wrong and you could be right.
Absolutely fine, in and of itself, it's always worthwhile to take into account the possibility that you might be wrong, but it doesn't resolve the question of what to actually do in any real-life case. To take a less dramatic case than the murderous sibling, say that you think that your child is old enough to contribute to their share of household work, and in particular do the dishes. The child disagrees, they would prefer to watch TV instead. It is possible that you are wrong and they are right about the relative value of washing dishes versus watching TV. But once you've acknowledged the question, do you then make your child wash the dishes or not?
This jives with my anecdotal experience (including 3 years of being home schooled in the lower grades). Two friends of mine who were home schooled all 12 years have pretty distinguished career tracks: one attended Harvard Law and works for a big consulting firm, the other is in a tenure-track position in the UC system.
One thing, though: I find home schooled children to be odder (on average) than their publicly/privately schooled counterparts.
@ Jehu: I too have liked every homeschooled kid that I have met. I've always attributed that to my conjecture that they are used to pleasing adults rather than their same-age peers. I've also noticed they seem to share more interests with grown-ups.
I once shared a table at a high-intensity programming class with a 14-year-old homeschooler who was able to stay up with the class. My children were the same age and I couldn't imagine them staying on task for eight hours a day.
I recently wrote about this in my blog (http://sicsempertyrannosaur..., in a post called "School: The worst job you'll ever have" - I'd be interested to see your thoughts.
Precisely!"Nearly a hundred years ago, this schoolman thought self-alienation was the secret to successful industrial society. Surely he was right. When you stand at a machine or sit at a computer you need an ability to withdraw from life, to alienate yourself without a supervisor. How else could that be tolerated unless prepared in advance by simulated Birkenhead drills? School, thought Harris, was sensible preparation for a life of alienation. Can you say he was wrong?"- http://johntaylorgatto.com/...
One obvious answer is that schools, as institutions devoted *only* to teaching, ostensibly, can be completely corrupted and self-serving in a way that a business employing children cannot be, since it must answer to the free market as well. If you serve 2 masters, only 1 needs to be effective at supervising you.
RR,Does public education encourage people to have more kids than they would otherwise? Only significant datapoint on this I see is that homeschool families have significantly more kids than most other families (I believe they average over 3 kids, HLDSA has quite a few statistics on homeschool demographics). Anyone have any other datapoints?
The best evidence I’ve seen that school adds great value is the stories I’ve heard about how difficult are employees who grew up in “primitive” cultures without familiar schools. Apparently, it is not so much that such folks don’t know enough to be useful, but that they refuse to accept being told what to do, and object to being publicly ranked relative to co-workers. Why child labor could not similarly aclimate kids, however, isn’t clear to me.
So child-rearing should be about breaking a child's will? That is despicable. It is anti-rational to resolve disagreements in a non-truth seeking way. This means that if you have a disagreement with a child it is wrong to force them to do things your way. You should take the fallibilist attitude that I could be wrong and you could be right.
This thread makes me laugh, because it just proves everything Gatto and the rest of the Unschoolers say: school makes people oppress themselves; we don't need slavemasters, we have the impressions on the psyche left by schoolteachers.
I think higher education has a higher signaling to practical value ratio than early education. Think of two things: 1) What job does a 5-year-old qualify for? 2) Would an employer hiring for such a low skill (and most likely low paying) job be willing to put forth the effort to teach that 5-year-old to read or do basic math? They would most likely just assign the child tasks that don't require literacy or math skills. Then at what point will the child acquire math and language skills?
I think there are certain skills that really are best learned in the classroom. Reading, writing, and math are basic skills that are applicable to just about any job and also make you more capable of acquiring new skills. Now the question is, at what point does the signaling value of the education outweigh the content value of the education? Will a third grade education sufficiently prepare you for your first job? Sixth grade? Ninth grade? Society currently seems to put the cut off at high school. If you have a college degree, there is a signaling value in where you went. If you have a high school degree, no one really cares where, they just care that you have one. And if you don't have a high school degree, there is really no distinction (in terms of signaling) between having achieved a 9th grade education and a third grade education. To potential employers, a drop-out is a drop-out.
But if child labor laws AND compulsory education went away, what would the new cut-off be? At what point does all that time spent studying history and literature and algebra take away from time that could be better spent learning a trade?
Another point that came up in a discussion I had about this: Does compulsory, public education encourage people to have children? In agricultural societies, children we an asset - more people means more hands to work the farm. And skills learned working the farm would carry on into their adult lives. But in modern society, children would probably be more difficult to employ, and would therefore be less capable of contributing to the family's pocket book when they are young, and a lack of education would prevent them from contributing to the family's pocket book when they are older. If public education did not provide free education/babysitting, would people have fewer children?
That the actual content of education has such a small part in its value is, I think, just wrong wrong wrong.
I'm a super smart guy, so I probably would have been "well educated" even if I had stayed home. Even so I can still remember learning algebra and geometry and various sciences in elementary school, and chem, bio, physics in jr high and high. These were all directly relevant to college where I learned a crapload of physics, math, philosophy, and econ which I can still remember, and much of which I use regularly.
For my kids, who are closer to average than me, it is clear that they are learning much more math and science in school than they would learn just "hanging out" with me and their mom. Sure, mom and I could homeschool, make a dedicated effort to do what the school does, we could also fix our own cars, mow our own lawn, fix our own plumbing, etc. THe point is the subject matter at school is super important, my kids put real effort into learning it, and I would find another way to get them to learn it if they weren't in school, because in my life1) I learned it in school, 2) it was and still is super important.
Gwern,Here's one, although you'd have to do it on the sly, as I'm almost certain that it's illegal because nobody likes competition, especially unionized entrenched interests.Find a homeschool mom who has one or more kids in the same general age and ability bracket as your little one. Similar temperments and friendship between the kids is also very desireable. Offer said mom $5k/year to add your little one to her homeschool class. There is a potential downside to this though---your child is likely to bond very strongly to the homeschool mom, so I wouldn't recommend this if you're both distant and jealous by nature.But there's no reason everyone can't 'win' in this scenario. You'll just have to lie and say you're homeschooling the child yourself though. Or you could say that you're paying said homeschool mom for 'educational consulting'.
Think about what happens in so many towns after a student leaves high school. Not only does the local social life often stop for that student, it may even slow down for the students' parents as they do not have the same bonds to the community when their child leaves to find work wherever that may be. In other words, there is little or no knowledge integration at the local level of so many places where people actually live, beyond the educational system itself. That lack of knowledge integration in a direct and local sense is a big part of the problem. We are brought up to believe that we have a place to succeed but most likely it is not where we already are, and then everyone takes part in the race to find the magic place where one's life learning can actually be used. We need knowledge integration at local levels so that knowledge can once again be valued for what it actually provides.
Education was one of the basic needs oh human knowledge to face the world.
So child-rearing should be about breaking a child’s will?
You really think that the only way people can cooperate is if their wills are broken?
It is anti-rational to resolve disagreements in a non-truth seeking way.
I disagree. Some disagreements are unresolvable in a truth-seeking way, eg ones about values, and yet we must make some decisions, so in those cases it is rational to use non-truth seeking ways. For example, where to go for a summer holiday, there's no single truth about what the right holiday is. Or, the religious settlement reached in Europe and the USA about what religion is true, is that of religious freedom - we agree that it's best if everyone makes up their own mind on what religion is true, perhaps none, rather than trying to seek out which religion is true.
This means that if you have a disagreement with a child it is wrong to force them to do things your way.
Ah, so if your child is jealous of their new baby brother and wants to drown the brat, you should not force them to refrain from their murderous impulses?
You should take the fallibilist attitude that I could be wrong and you could be right.
Absolutely fine, in and of itself, it's always worthwhile to take into account the possibility that you might be wrong, but it doesn't resolve the question of what to actually do in any real-life case. To take a less dramatic case than the murderous sibling, say that you think that your child is old enough to contribute to their share of household work, and in particular do the dishes. The child disagrees, they would prefer to watch TV instead. It is possible that you are wrong and they are right about the relative value of washing dishes versus watching TV. But once you've acknowledged the question, do you then make your child wash the dishes or not?
This jives with my anecdotal experience (including 3 years of being home schooled in the lower grades). Two friends of mine who were home schooled all 12 years have pretty distinguished career tracks: one attended Harvard Law and works for a big consulting firm, the other is in a tenure-track position in the UC system.
One thing, though: I find home schooled children to be odder (on average) than their publicly/privately schooled counterparts.
@ Jehu: I too have liked every homeschooled kid that I have met. I've always attributed that to my conjecture that they are used to pleasing adults rather than their same-age peers. I've also noticed they seem to share more interests with grown-ups.
I once shared a table at a high-intensity programming class with a 14-year-old homeschooler who was able to stay up with the class. My children were the same age and I couldn't imagine them staying on task for eight hours a day.
Regards, Bill Drissel
It makes sense to me.
I recently wrote about this in my blog (http://sicsempertyrannosaur..., in a post called "School: The worst job you'll ever have" - I'd be interested to see your thoughts.
Precisely!"Nearly a hundred years ago, this schoolman thought self-alienation was the secret to successful industrial society. Surely he was right. When you stand at a machine or sit at a computer you need an ability to withdraw from life, to alienate yourself without a supervisor. How else could that be tolerated unless prepared in advance by simulated Birkenhead drills? School, thought Harris, was sensible preparation for a life of alienation. Can you say he was wrong?"- http://johntaylorgatto.com/...
One obvious answer is that schools, as institutions devoted *only* to teaching, ostensibly, can be completely corrupted and self-serving in a way that a business employing children cannot be, since it must answer to the free market as well. If you serve 2 masters, only 1 needs to be effective at supervising you.
RR,Does public education encourage people to have more kids than they would otherwise? Only significant datapoint on this I see is that homeschool families have significantly more kids than most other families (I believe they average over 3 kids, HLDSA has quite a few statistics on homeschool demographics). Anyone have any other datapoints?
The best evidence I’ve seen that school adds great value is the stories I’ve heard about how difficult are employees who grew up in “primitive” cultures without familiar schools. Apparently, it is not so much that such folks don’t know enough to be useful, but that they refuse to accept being told what to do, and object to being publicly ranked relative to co-workers. Why child labor could not similarly aclimate kids, however, isn’t clear to me.
So child-rearing should be about breaking a child's will? That is despicable. It is anti-rational to resolve disagreements in a non-truth seeking way. This means that if you have a disagreement with a child it is wrong to force them to do things your way. You should take the fallibilist attitude that I could be wrong and you could be right.
This thread makes me laugh, because it just proves everything Gatto and the rest of the Unschoolers say: school makes people oppress themselves; we don't need slavemasters, we have the impressions on the psyche left by schoolteachers.
I think higher education has a higher signaling to practical value ratio than early education. Think of two things: 1) What job does a 5-year-old qualify for? 2) Would an employer hiring for such a low skill (and most likely low paying) job be willing to put forth the effort to teach that 5-year-old to read or do basic math? They would most likely just assign the child tasks that don't require literacy or math skills. Then at what point will the child acquire math and language skills?
I think there are certain skills that really are best learned in the classroom. Reading, writing, and math are basic skills that are applicable to just about any job and also make you more capable of acquiring new skills. Now the question is, at what point does the signaling value of the education outweigh the content value of the education? Will a third grade education sufficiently prepare you for your first job? Sixth grade? Ninth grade? Society currently seems to put the cut off at high school. If you have a college degree, there is a signaling value in where you went. If you have a high school degree, no one really cares where, they just care that you have one. And if you don't have a high school degree, there is really no distinction (in terms of signaling) between having achieved a 9th grade education and a third grade education. To potential employers, a drop-out is a drop-out.
But if child labor laws AND compulsory education went away, what would the new cut-off be? At what point does all that time spent studying history and literature and algebra take away from time that could be better spent learning a trade?
Another point that came up in a discussion I had about this: Does compulsory, public education encourage people to have children? In agricultural societies, children we an asset - more people means more hands to work the farm. And skills learned working the farm would carry on into their adult lives. But in modern society, children would probably be more difficult to employ, and would therefore be less capable of contributing to the family's pocket book when they are young, and a lack of education would prevent them from contributing to the family's pocket book when they are older. If public education did not provide free education/babysitting, would people have fewer children?
That the actual content of education has such a small part in its value is, I think, just wrong wrong wrong.
I'm a super smart guy, so I probably would have been "well educated" even if I had stayed home. Even so I can still remember learning algebra and geometry and various sciences in elementary school, and chem, bio, physics in jr high and high. These were all directly relevant to college where I learned a crapload of physics, math, philosophy, and econ which I can still remember, and much of which I use regularly.
For my kids, who are closer to average than me, it is clear that they are learning much more math and science in school than they would learn just "hanging out" with me and their mom. Sure, mom and I could homeschool, make a dedicated effort to do what the school does, we could also fix our own cars, mow our own lawn, fix our own plumbing, etc. THe point is the subject matter at school is super important, my kids put real effort into learning it, and I would find another way to get them to learn it if they weren't in school, because in my life1) I learned it in school, 2) it was and still is super important.
Robin is referring here to signaling in the context of the job market, not the sexual market.
Gwern,Here's one, although you'd have to do it on the sly, as I'm almost certain that it's illegal because nobody likes competition, especially unionized entrenched interests.Find a homeschool mom who has one or more kids in the same general age and ability bracket as your little one. Similar temperments and friendship between the kids is also very desireable. Offer said mom $5k/year to add your little one to her homeschool class. There is a potential downside to this though---your child is likely to bond very strongly to the homeschool mom, so I wouldn't recommend this if you're both distant and jealous by nature.But there's no reason everyone can't 'win' in this scenario. You'll just have to lie and say you're homeschooling the child yourself though. Or you could say that you're paying said homeschool mom for 'educational consulting'.